How to Add Some Muscle to Your Sales Kickoff
The article emphasizes that despite U.S. companies spending $70 billion annually on sales training, traditional methods yield poor retention and ROI, and recommends enhancing National Sales Meetings and Sales Kickoffs by integrating modern, continuous learning techniques—such as pre-event video pitch contests and ongoing content review—to improve engagement, knowledge retention, and sales performance.
National Sales Meeting (NSM) and Sales Kickoff (SKO) planning season is here, so it's important to ensure your event is impactful and equips reps with critical knowledge that sticks.
The Disappointing ROI of Sales Training
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review noted that U.S. companies spend $70 billion annually on sales training (an average of $1,459 per rep), which is almost 20 percent more than they spend on employees in all other functions. Yet, the ROI of sales training is often disappointing. Studies indicate that participants in traditional curriculum-based training can forget 80% or more of the information they were taught within 90 days.
Many are familiar with the "forgetting curve," and the problem is compounded by the typical approach to sales training: one-off onboarding sessions and national sales meetings where reps are overloaded with information in a short time. Even when training is more continuous, reps often lack sufficient coaching or rigorous performance evaluations.
Implement Modern Learning Techniques to ‘Add Muscle’ to Sales Kickoffs
Is it time to ditch traditional sales kickoffs and national sales meetings? Not necessarily. Instead of abandoning past practices, consider building on them to create something better. Modern learning enables you to enhance your NSMs and SKOs quickly and cost-effectively—before, during, and after the event.
With a modern learning approach, you can create learning content that reps can view and review as many times as they want before the event begins.
For example, to supplement their yearly NSM, Pacific Life sends relevant learning content and exercises to the field force beforehand in the form of pitch contests. Managers and subject matter experts create short videos demonstrating what “good” looks like and send them to the team as a model. Then, everyone submits their version of the pitch, and the system surfaces the top 10 based on relevant criteria. The entire team watches the top 10 and votes on a winner to be highlighted at the NSM. This way, everyone has practiced before the live meeting and arrives ready to go deeper.
Consider all the information you typically include in the NSM session. What could you do with those hours if the basics (operational information, HR policies, etc.) were made available on video for reps to preview on their own time? With generic learning done virtually, in-person sessions could focus on learning best done live.
By tracking which reps have completed their homework before in-person training, sales managers can identify employees who may need more or less coaching later on.
These are some of the ways a modern learning platform can be used before official training. In the second part of this article, further strategies for during and after the sessions are discussed.